Last-Minute Shoppers; or, It's Thanksgiving Already?

All I needed was a bag of pecans and a block of gruyere cheese. That's all. So after parking a quarter-mile away – well, seemed like it – I walked into my local grocery establishment at 5:02 p.m. to procure the last necessary items for our Thanksgiving eve feast. I was in and out in a surprisingly fast 12 minutes, 1.2 seconds. That, despite having trouble finding the cheese and chatting with a fellow church member who had also been dispatched by his wife to purchase some food items.

Thank heaven for self check-out.

Nevertheless, I was amazed to once again witness the phenomenon of last-minute shopping. I know Southerners can move slower than molasses in January, but why do we think it's a good idea to wait until the night before a major holiday to do our shopping? It's not like these things sneak up on us; Madison Avenue makes sure of that. It's one thing if you're grabbing a couple of things, like I did, but you've got people piling up the their shopping carts.

My wife wisely bought most of her Thanksgiving fixings last week – and I must say, it was a feast that can't possibly be topped (turkey, sweet potato casserole, homemade mashed potatoes, cornbread [both sweet and unsweet, to accommodate our respective tastes], corn, green beans and pumpkin pie). As an aside, my wife and kids and I have our own feast the night before, and then we gather with extended family on Thanksgiving Day. I don't even bother trying to count up the calories.

I'm a procrastinator myself, and probably most of us are, but this last-minute shopping frenzy we see all the time befuddles me. Oh well. Time to go eat some pumpkin pie.